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From 2 March 2019, the Nicholas Hall in the Winter Palace is the setting for the exhibition “Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678). Paintings and Drawings from Russian Collections” that has been organized by the State Hermitage in conjunction with the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and with the participation of the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, the Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum, and the Perm State Art Gallery. For the first time, visitors will be also able to see a painting from the Holy Trinity Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

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The foremost stimulating impulse in the formation of the young artist was provided by Rubens. Jordaens was not his direct pupil, but in his youth he did have close connections with the studio of the celebrated head of the Flemish school. The imprint of Rubens’s art is evident in both early works by our artist included in the exhibition – the Self-Portrait with Parents, Brothers and Sisters already mentioned and Saints Paul and Barnabas at Lystra. The world of exceptional great passions and lofty heroics that we find in Rubens’s oeuvre was alien to Jordaens. The joys and worries of everyday life, the feelings of ordinary people were the sphere of his art. In his early period, the artist gave expression to his observations of life almost exclusively within the sphere of religious painting. Typically for Jordaens, however, within the Gospel stories he usually selects the moments that allow him to present what are primarily situations from daily life.

In his paintings on mythological subjects, Jordaens enters into a sort of “artistic dialogue” with the great Flemish master. His Meleager and Atalanta (Yekaterinburg State Museum of Fine Arts), in contrast to Rubens presents a far from heroic moment in the ancient legend about the Calydonian hunt. Jordaens had his own characteristic approach to the interpretation of images from classical antiquity: bringing the lofty and ideal back down to earth, a tendency to present simple mortals in the guise of gods or heroes. This is testimony to the influence of Caravaggism on him, although the artist would have been able to absorb Caravaggio’s ideas only at a certain remove. The importance of the Caravaggist stage in the artist’s career (late 1610s to mid-1620s) but they above all in the fact that it logically brought Jordaens to the creation of his own genre compositions – paintings on the theme of Flemish sayings and holidays. A special place in Jordaens’s oeuvre was taken by the depiction of the feast of the “Bean King”. The artist returned repeatedly to that theme from the late 1630s onwards. And it was specifically paintings on this subject that became the foundation of the artist’s fame. However, this Caravaggist element first appeared clearly in Jordaens’s art long before the depictions of the feast of the Bean King – in paintings illustrating Aesop’s fable of the satyr and the peasant. Here the plot of the ancient tale is only an excuse for the artist to show the ordinary mealtime of a peasant family, in which the woodland deity just happens to take part. One of Jordaens’s finest works on the subject of Aesop’s fable is a painting belonging to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. At this early stage in his career, Jordaens was still not mixing his paints, striving to preserve their natural, somewhat glaring but pure resonance and he did not use glazes, but painted from the first stroke with a full brush and thick paint, not hiding his “working”.

From the mid-1630s, Jacob Jordaens began to work actively for the Flemish tapestry manufacturers, chiefly those in Brussels. The painting Odysseus and Polyphemus (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow) included in the exhibition was created around 1635 and is a painted modello, originally intended to be reproduced by weavers as a tapestry in a cycle devoted to The Story of Odysseus. Such modelli, even when they had been used as the basis for the creation of cartoons from which tapestries were then made, could later serve as cabinet pictures. There are grounds for believing that the composition of the Hermitage’s painting The Bean King (“The King Drinks!”) was initially conceived by the artist as a design for a tapestry. That plan was not realized, but the resulting picture is among Jordaens’s unarguable masterpieces. In it the artist emerges with all the brilliance of a mature master, revealing himself to be both a superb colourist and a lively, vivid and observant story-teller. The work blends together grand monumentality of compositional structure, vivid depiction of a situation from daily life and a portrait-like persuasiveness in the presentation of the individual appearance of each personage. The artist was fond of using specific people as models. Most often it was members of his family who posed for him: his wife Catharina, their daughters Elisabeth and Anna Catharina, their son Jacob, and his father-in-law, Adam van Noort. He also included himself in his compositions from time to time. For example, in the Hermitage version of the feast of the Bean King, the artist gave his own features to the man sitting behind the “King” and “Queen” and raising high the jug in his left hand.

Paintings like The Bean King in the Hermitage can only be called genre pictures with certain reservations. Less than anything are they simple reproductions of scenes from everyday life. In them one can always sense something more: the artist’s desire to exalt, to monumentalize the images of his personages.

The artist’s constantly working in parallel in two fields of creativity – decorative art and painting – inevitably led to interaction between them. A splendid instance of such fusion of Jordaens’s skills as a painter and a decorative artist is the 1640 depiction of The Flight into Egypt (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Moscow) in which the action of the Gospel episode unfolds against the background of a landscape treated in a decorative manner. The landscape occupies a noticeable place in this composition, which is the only example of Jordaens’s work as a landscape artist in the exhibition.

The portraits created in the 1630s and ’40s are not devoid of a decorative aspect either. They idiosyncratically combine a decorative setting with almost documentary precision in the presentation of the model’s appearance. For example, in the Hermitage’s Portrait of an Old Man the artist shows without any flattery the subject’s obese figure, flabby face and rheumy eyes, yet the sumptuous architectural surroundings, the scale of the figure – advanced into the foreground and filling almost the entire surface of the canvas, its precise contours and large forms invest the image with undoubted grandeur.

In the 1640s and ’50s, following the death of Rubens, Jordaens became the “first painter of Antwerp”. Between 1649 and 1650 he worked to a commission from the widow of the Prince of Orange, who had been a great admirer of the Flemish school of painting, on large decorative and allegorical compositions to adorn the Orange Hall of the Huis ten Bosch (“House in the Woods”) palace outside The Hague. One of them – The Triumph of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange – is closely connected stylistically to the Hermitage’s Allegorical Family Portrait. That monumental decorative work demonstrates the great skill of a painter who had a subtle sense of the decorative nature of colour.

In those decades, loaded with commissions, Jordaens increasingly relied on the aid of his assistants and pupils. Examples of the collaboration between Jordaens and his studio in this period are, among other things, two paintings on Gospel subjects: another version of Saints Paul and Barnabas at Lystra from the Perm State Art Gallery and Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well from the State Art Museum in Nizhny Novgorod. The picture from Perm is a repetition with some changes of Jordaens’s 1645 painting of the same title that belongs to the gallery of the Academy of Arts in Vienna. As for the work from Nizhny Novgorod: Jordaens’s son, Jacob the Younger (1625 – after 1650), may have participated in its creation.

The bulk of the commissions that Jordaens produced for tapestry workshops date from the 1640s and 1650s. Features that characterized his tapestry designs, such as the precise silhouettes of the figures, pronounced large local patches of colour, a clear division of the space into foreground, middle and background, combined with the decorative treatment of the last, also became characteristic of the artist’s paintings. An example of this is provided by Cleopatra’s Feast from the Hermitage. At the same time, that picture reflects one of the most important tendencies in the late period of the artist’s career – the increasing semantic complexity of a work and a tendency to pack it full of a variety of symbolic and allegorical elements. In Jordaens’s interpretation, the anecdotal story from ancient history carries a clear moralizing message. That tendency to moralizing and didactics, at odds with all the artist’s previous oeuvre, is clearly in evidence in many of the late works. This was evidently a consequence of the fact that in the 1650s, after converting to Protestantism, Jordaens began to openly profess its Calvinist version, although that did not hinder him from accepting commissions from Catholic churches, monasteries and convents.

For the exhibition the State Hermitage Publishing House has produced a scholarly illustrated catalogue with forewords by Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage, and Marina Loshak, Director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

The authors of the catalogue texts and curators of the exhibition are Natalia Ivanovna Gritsai, head of the sector of 13th– 18th-century painting in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art, and Alexei Olegovich Larionov, senior researcher in the same department.

Our exhibition tells about how Jordaens was and is loved in Russia. His works were bought by Catherine the Great and after her by many a high-ranking collector. The healthy Flemish spirit impressed the energetic people of a young Russia. They probably also liked the multitude of layers in the artist’s oeuvre. Enthusiasm, at times seemingly excessive, for extolling the virtues of family relations, idylls of family music-making, combined in his art with the religious ecstasy of a Catholic who towards the end of his life became not just a Protestant, but a Calvinist. And that found splendid reflection in the caricature allusions to the Catholic clergy in the Miracle at Lystra (Saints Paul and Barnabas at Lystra) from Perm.

Jordaens took firm root in Russia and his works have a special Russian biography, some episodes of which I would like to mention especially. Catherine II presented the monumental Lamentation to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The Flemish style for depicting Christ’s passion with exultation and, at the same time, with what is almost a still life of the instruments of his execution proved entirely appropriate in the ritual setting of an Orthodox church, which the painting has adorned for several centuries now. We have here a characteristic example of European art becoming incorporated into Russian life, a process of which the whole of Saint Petersburg is a manifestation. And the painting’s presence in our exhibition is an example of the dialogue between museum and Church that is so important for everyone.

Another episode of Jordaens’s story in Russia is connected with the collection of his remarkable drawings. Many of them were attributed to the artist only as a result of tenacious research by several generations of our scholars, especially the present-day ones. Thanks to that, we have an exhibition of discoveries, a striking artistic event for both experts and the general public. It provides occasions for much reflection. Among other things, it is fascinating to compare the Flemish Judith with the Hermitage’s famous Judith by Giorgione and to ponder once again about the contradictions and complex emotional background of that remarkable tale that some accept as canonical and others do not.

It is amazing how many new things it is possible to see simply by bringing the works by Jordaens in Russia together. My thanks to my colleagues for the idea.